The arrogant Coyote’s efforts to trap the Road Runner all ended in calamity for their creator, who ended the cartoon by amending his opening remarks: “Allow me to introduce myself – my name is mud.”

Once again the Democrats in Washington, believing themselves oh-so-clever and oh-so-resourceful, have proved themselves to be the Wile E. Coyotes of gotcha politics. Time and again since 9/11, they have convinced themselves that they have George W. Bush cornered.

And time and again, their criticisms have blown up in their own faces.

The latest my-name-is-mud moment for the Democrats came over the weekend, with the shocking and thrilling surprise arrest of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The seizure of al Qaeda’s operations honcho was a painstaking triumph that took months of intelligence coordination and careful interagency work.

But to listen to some Democrats these past months, you’d think that the White House and the administration have done nothing but bungle the struggle against al Qaeda. They’ve argued with great heat that the president has allowed himself to be distracted by the looming war with Iraq and is therefore neglecting the war on terrorism.

You could almost sense the glee with which Bush’s opponents seized on this argument. It allowed them to criticize the president while seeming to take a hard-line stand.

One of them, Sen. Bob Graham of Florida, was so taken with the argument that he decided he should run for president against Bush on the strength of it. Filing papers last week to launch his presidential run, Graham proudly declared, “I am the only candidate who was in a position to vote on the Iraq resolution who voted no.”

Wile E. Graham voted no back in October because, he said, “I predict we will live to regret this day, Oct. 10, 2002, the day we stood by and we allowed these terrorist organizations to continue growing in the shadows. It may be days, weeks, months or years before they strike Americans again, and we will have allowed them to grow that capability.”

Mohammed’s arrest came only a week after a major breakthrough in the war on terrorism domestically – the arrest of Sami Al-Arian, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad official who had been using his tenured position at the University of South Florida as cover for his noxious activities.

The Al-Arian arrest was made possible by the use of the USA Patriot Act, a law that has come under increasing fire from Democrats and liberals for supposedly doing horrific damage to civil liberties.

And these arrests, and all sorts of other counterterrorist actions we don’t yet know about, have taken place during a terrifically distracting period of the Bush presidency – a period that might come to be known as the Hans Blix Hiccup.

It’s clear from the successes of the past two weeks that this administration can indeed walk and chew gum at the same time. It can prepare for war with Iraq and fight the war on terrorism. But according to an obsessive Bush-bashing journalist named Jonathan Chait, “Bush’s record on homeland security ought to be considered a scandal.”

Chait makes this declaration in a New Republic cover story called “The September 10 President” – an article that, in a marvel of ironic timing, was published two days before Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s arrest.

Wile E. Chait, whose primary job these past two years has been to lay out every conceivable reason we should oppose the Bush tax cuts, tries to argue that the president’s tax proposals are doing damage to homeland security. He mentions as evidence all kinds of wish-list Washington proposals designed to throw money willy-nilly at various problems that have been rejected by the administration.

Come now. Surely even Wile E. Chait, Super Genius, knows this is an absurd contention. The president doesn’t wake up at 5 a.m. and worry about his tax cuts. He’s worrying about the war on terror and the fight against militant Islam.

If President Al Gore were doing exactly what Bush has been doing on homeland security, Chait and Graham would be dancing in the streets.

Instead, they’re designing super-genius arguments that are blowing up in their own faces.